Hi Ojasvi,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 1: I’m equally interested in pretty much everything but not especially committed to any one interest .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and tradition.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were spiritual, social, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Ask out the person I like :) .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Living happily ever after (Jkjk) .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Nerves/underconfidence .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I next see the person alone, then I will ask them out ;) .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Academics .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Defensive when receiving critical feedback, and Defensive when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being keeping up with family and friends in a different time zone .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Warm .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Goals arranged in a hierarchy that form your North Star |
| To engage with people and get them to like you and feel 'seen' repeat the last thing they said/a verbatim quote from them back to them. "Leave you namecards on the table" -Angela Duckworth |
| Learning rate is largely same, what makes a difference is baseline knowledge |
| You use it or lose it- your train it to gain it |
| What can I do/stop doing that would make it easier to work with me? |
| How to do a good intro - specific example and surprise element |
| Changing your situation helps! |
| Mentors are role models that give you information and motivation |
| Team players do not score higher in IQ but do in RMET |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Sydney Liu |
| Ojasvi is such a warm and welcoming person, and I'm so glad I got to know her this semester. It's amazed me that she is able to form so many genuine friendships/connections in her brief semester abroad at Penn! OJ is an exchange student from Sydney, Australia, and from the first day we met, I could tell that she has a wonderful heart and an enduring desire to grow. She brings a thoughtful and optimistic perspective to our group discussions, both inside and outside of the classroom. She is a person of "yes!", saying yes to new experiences and opportunities to meet others, and she has such a bright future ahead of her. I'm so glad not only to have her as my classmate, but to have found in her, a true friend. In our time in Grit lab, she has demonstrated her benevolent character and her desire to grow, and she has taught me what "grit" is all about.
Her Discovery Project focused on exploring food and culture, and I believe that here, OJ's welcoming personality really shone. She invited me to her dorm room for a lovely home-cooked dinner, and it was one of the highlights of my semester. I felt we had a very open and introspective conversation over a simple but delicious meal of rice, lentils, and yogurt. Though she is from Australia, OJ's family is Indian, and she explained some of her family's culture and food. We then talked about her experience at Penn, the differences between America and Australia, and how culture fits into that picture. We were able to connect more deeply over our own experiences, and enjoy a lovely meal. OJ is the type of person who invites you along to everything—from trying out culinary classes offered by Penn's dining service (we went to a Diwali-themed session, it was amazing!) to dinner parties, she has shown me that food is not just about the meal, but about connecting with people. It's no wonder that she is so popular and had so many friends over for Thanksgiving, even though she's only been here for a semester!
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| Madeline Kohn |
| Ojasvi is an incredibly warm and nurturing personality. As an exchange student, it was so impressive to hear about all of the adventures she was going on in this new country, and how many new friends she was able to make in such a short time. I learned the first week that OJ fought tooth and nail to be able to take GritLab, and that dedication for the course material was clear in our class discussions. She was always very open about the challenges she faced adjusting to college life in the US, yet always followed it up with a concrete plan or an optimistic note. Always on the lookout to help others, her anecdotes and advice about friendship and relationships raised the bar for our class discussions.
True to this warmth and proclivity for connections, it is fitting that OJ's discovery project was primarily about cooking for others. She is so naturally oriented towards giving, that exploring her passion for food was naturally intertwined with sharing the product of her labor with others. This discovery reminded me about the connective powers of shared food, and inspired me to devote myself to new relationships like OJ does. Her presentation was also very thoughtfully put together, with vibrant photos and compelling formatting. Like everything else about OJ, her project and its presentation were carefully thought through, with others in mind. |
| Jay Brown |
| Ojasvi, I’m happy to have met you this semester. I could tell since the first day that you are a very kind person. You always have a smile on your face, and it’s infectious to others. You always brought positive energy to our team every class, and you made our day better every single time.
I could see the same positivity and kindness through your discovery project as well. You chose to cook for friends during the project, which I thought was so kind. The pictures in your presentation showed that you bring smiles to many faces (and the food also looked amazing). I hope that when you get home you can show off your new cooking skills to your family and friends, and I’m sure it will bring smiles to all their faces as well.
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.